Cyber Attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

IT Security is the name of the game and no matter how big or small the size of your organization, you will always invest enough on securing certain aspects of your IT network. In many organizations, it starts with monitoring your network for vulnerabilities that may enter the network to access potentially sensitive information in the form of security attacks . For example, you may have firewalls as your first line of defense, followed by vulnerability management, intrusion detection and prevention systems, managing your network configurations and so on.  These are crucial because: Your routers can be easily breached without proper configuration and restrictions.  If a firewall isn't configured correctly, a hacker can easily spot a port that is accidentally left open and can gain access to the network.  Rogue access points, botnet malware and social engineering can make your wireless a porthole into your LAN. Why Logs? The very purpose of IT security is to be

16-Year-Old Teenager has been arrested over his alleged involvement in the World's biggest largest DDoS attacks against the Dutch anti-spam group Spamhaus . The teenager, whose name is unknown at this point, was arrested by British police in April, but details of his arrest were just leaked to the British press on Thursday. He was taken into custody when police swooped on his south-west London home after investigations identified significant sums of money were flowing through his bank account. The suspect was found with his computer systems open and logged on to various virtual systems and forums. The March 20 attack on Spamhaus has been dubbed as the " biggest cyber attack in the history of the Internet " which saw server of the Dutch anti-spam organization being bombarded with traffic in tune of 300 billion bits per second (300Gbps). A DDoS attack takes place when hackers use an army of infected computers to send traffic to a server, causing a shutdown in the process. I

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

There is currently a Mega cyber attack campaign being launched on a large number of WordPress websites across the Internet.  In April, 2012 we reported about a large distributed brute force attack against millions of WordPress sites were occurring, out of that hackers are successful to compromise 90,000 servers to create a large Botnet  of Wordpress hosts. According to the DDOS attack logs report  received from a ' The Hacker News ' reader ' Steven Veldkamp ', victim's website was under under heavy DDOS attack recently, coming from various compromised Wordpress based websites. Possibly using the brute force attack on WordPress administrative portals with the a world list of the most commonly used username and password combinations, attackers are taking control of many poorly secured WordPress Hosts. After analyzing the piece of a DDOS attack Log file from timing 23/Sep/2013:13:03:13 +0200 to 23/Sep/2013:13:02:47 +0200, we found that in 26 second attacker was

Attackers exploiting a zero-day vulnerability CVE-2013-3893 in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser and served them on compromised popular Japanese news websites. According to FireEye , at least three major Japanese media websites were compromised in watering hole attacks, dubbed Operation DeputyDog , appears to target manufacturers, government entities and media organizations in Japan. The compromised sites recorded more than 75,000 page views before the exploits were discovered. The zero-day vulnerability in IE 8 and 9 allows the stealthy installation of software in the users' computers which then can be remotely accessed by the hackers. The hackers typically use Trojans designed specifically for a pay-to-order attack to steal intellectual property. Researchers saw a payload executable file used against a Japanese target posing as an image file hosted on a Hong Kong server. The attack in Japan was discovered two days after Microsoft disclosed the flaw ," The ex

Sentencing for former LulzSec leader Hector Xavier Monsegur , better known as " Sabu " , has again been delayed. Monsegur pleaded guilty to a dozen criminal counts two years prior and stands to face more a maximum sentence of more than 124 years. Another Lulzsec Hacker Jeremy Hammond has claimed that the FBI used Sabu to coordinate attacks against foreign governments, by  Anonymous hackers and Others. The delays indicate that the FBI is not extracting information from Monsegur and this could mean that the hacker may be helping FBI with other covert operations as Jeremy Hammond claims. Jeremy Hammond, released a statement on Thursday accusing the US government of asking Monsegur to encourage fellow hacktivists to infiltrate foreign government entities. " What many do not know is that Sabu was also used by his handlers to facilitate the hacking of the targets of the government's choosing including numerous websites belonging to foreign governments" , Ham

A cyber attack campaign  is ongoing and targeting thousands of Israeli websites by Pakistani hackers, in support of  Palestine people. They had already infiltrated reportedly 650 Israel  websites listen on Pastebin and upload their page with custom messages on servers. The hacker claimed and told 'The Hacker News' that they will release more hacked websites list soon. The hacker behind the massive attack mentioned his online name as " H4x0r HuSsY " and the message says, " LONG LIVE PALESTINE - PAKISTAN ZINDABAD HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY TO & FROM TEAM MADLEETS ". Hacked websites belong to Semi-Government, Personal and Israeli Corporates. At the time of writing, most of the websites still having deface page uploaded to their server. A few months back World wide Hackers and especially Anonymous group declared massive 'cyber war' on Israel after IDF threatens to cut off internet in Gaza.

A notorious Chinese hacker collective known as APT1 or Comment Crew, possibly linked to the Chinese Army, have been caught red handed breaking into a fake United States water control system i.e. known as a Honeypot . Kyle Wilhoit, a researcher with security company Trend Micro has just revealed the details at BlackHat Conference on Wednesday.  Hackers hacked a water control system for a US municipality back in December last year, but it was merely a decoy set up by Kyle Wilhoit using a Word document hiding malicious software to gain full access.  The honeypots directly mimicked the ICS/Scada devices used in many critical infrastructure power and water plants. Cloud software was used to create realistic Web-based login and configuration screens for local water plants seemingly based in Ireland, Russia, Singapore, China, Japan, Australia, Brazil, and the U.S. Researchers have been tracked back to the APT1 Group, which security company Mandiant has claimed operate

The passport control system at Istanbul Ataturk Airport International departure terminal was under cyber attack on Friday, while another airport in the Turkish largest city was also affected. Passengers stood in lines for hours and plane departures were delayed, because cyberattack shutdown passport control systems at two facilities. Later Authorities has restored the systems. Few local media said that the passport control system at the Sabiha Gokcen International Airport in Istanbul also broke down due to the malfunction of the Istanbul provincial security directorate's Polnet data system. They believe that systems were infected using some malwares, But Authorities also investigating if the malware yielded user details from the infected machines or not. No claim of responsibility or blame was attributed to the alleged cyberattack. However, this is another malware attacks been reported, targeting vital infrastructure so far. Cybersecurity has emerged as an emergin

There's a scam spreading through Twitter Direct messages (DMs) and fake emails, appealing users to visit a fake twitter phishing site i.e " twittler.com ". Scam uses a hijacked Twitter account to send out direct messages that appear completely legitimate. Security blogger, Janne Ahlberg blogged about this new phishing scam, " This is a nasty trick especially when the sender is someone you know and trust. If you receive a suspicious DM or email from a person you know and trust, just warn him/her – the account is most likely hijacked and controlled by the attackers. " The webpage resembles a Twitter login page and is trying to obtain your Twitter login credentials with a domain name looks very similar to original Twitter.com , with two extra word "LL" in it.   To play it safe, double-check your browser address bar to make sure that's where you are on orginal website  twitter.com before logging in. If you enter your Twitter usern

Google and Microsoft are at each other's throats again. In a recent statement, Microsoft says hackers have been actively exploiting a vulnerability that was publicly disclosed by a Google researcher,  Tavis Ormandy . Microsoft addressed the vulnerability in its monthly " Patch Tuesday " package of fixes for July. Tavis Ormandy revealed the vulnerability in Windows 7 and 8 allows local users to obtain escalated privileges , making it easier for a hacker to compromise a system. Ormandy has been criticized by Microsoft and some in the security community who subscribe to the practice that a vulnerability shouldn't be made public until a software maker has an opportunity to fix it. Ormandy said that Microsoft " treat vulnerability researchers with great hostility " and are " often very difficult to work with ". He also advised researchers to use pseudonyms when dealing with the software giants. In 2012, Tavis accused Sophos of " poor development practices

Security experts are confident that the Chinese hackers group known as Comment Crew is still operating under cover. " The Comment Crew is back again " this is the rumor within Intelligence community, researchers suspect the involvement of the group of hackers in the recent cyber dispute between U.S. and China. Let's make a step back, last February Mandiant Intelligence firm released an interesting report that revealed an enterprise-scale computer espionage campaign dubbed APT1. Mandiant linked the APT1 attacks, that compromised 141 organizations in seven years, to Chinese military unit called " 61398 ". The is very interesting is that the security firm identified a common pattern for the attacks conducted by Chinese hackers group, it was also able to define a series of key indicators for identifying ongoing APT attacks. Mandiant security firm had monitored the group during last years and report details its operations, it wasn't the only one FireEye is anoth

A computer hacker linked to the group known as Anonymous and LulzSec  pleaded guilty on Tuesday to breaking into Stratfor , a global intelligence company.  Hammond, 28, was arrested last March and charged with hacking into the computers of Stratfor. Jeremy Hammond and other members of AntiSec , stole confidential information, defaced websites and temporarily put some victims out of business. Authorities say their crimes affected more than 1 million people. Hammond was charged under the controversial 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law used to charge the late Aaron Swartz and other cyber-activists. The plea agreement could carry a sentence of as much as 10 years in prison, as well as millions of dollars in restitution payments, though Hammond's official sentence won't be handed down until September. Beyond Stratfor, Hammond took responsibility for eight other hacks, all of which involved either law enforcement, intelligence firms or defense contractor webs

Cyber Security researchers have discovered a family of information stealing malware targeting Pakistan that originates out of India.  Norman Shark, the global security leader in malware analysis solutions for enterprises, service providers and government, today released a report detailing a large and sophisticated cyber-attack infrastructure that appears to have originated from India. The attacks, conducted by private threat actors over a period of three years and still ongoing, showed no evidence of state sponsorship but the primary purpose of the global command-and-control network appears to be intelligence gathering from a combination of national security targets and private sector companies. Attackers used known vulnerabilities in Microsoft software, chucking malware dubbed HangOver onto target machines, most of which were based in Pakistan, where 511 infections associated with the campaign were detected. HangOver installs keyloggers , takes screenshots and rec

In the recent months I had the opportunity to conduct an interesting study on the use of Social Media in the Military Sector, large diffusion of media platforms makes them very attractive for governments and intelligence agencies . Social media platforms reveal enormous potentiality that could be exploited also in critical sectors such as military and defense. Modern social media networks are actively used by every government, the US, China and Russia are the most active in this field, but also emerging cyber countries like Iran and North Korea demonstrates an increasing interest in the matter. The principal uses of social media for government are Psychological Operations (PsyOps) OSInt Cyber espionage Offensive purposes On May 10th the Illinois Air National Guard 183rd Fighter Wing published a notice in the monthly issue of a newsletter titled Falcon View. The notice, that seems to be authentic, dedicates a paragraph to the use of social networking sites for

Four men accused of launching online attacks under the banner of LulzSec appeared in a London courtroom Wednesday for sentencing.  Ryan Ackroyd , Jake Davis , Mustafa al-Bassam and Ryan Cleary have all pleaded guilty to hacking offences. The name Lulzsec is a combination of ' lulz ' or 'lols', " LAUGHING AT YOUR SECURITY " meaning 'laugh out loud' and security, and was a direct descent of notorious hacking group Anonymous. Working from their bedrooms in 2011, caused millions of pounds of damage with attacks on NHS, CIA and US military websites, they stole huge amounts of sensitive personal data including emails, online passwords and credit card details belonging to hundreds of thousands of people, Southwark Crown Court in London heard. They also carried out distributed denial of service ( DDoS ) attacks on many institutions, crashing their websites. Ackroyd, 26, from Mexborough, South Yorkshire, has admitted stealing data from Sony . To do it, t

Trend Micro researchers have uncovered a new backdoor pieces of malware from the Winnti family, which are mainly used by a Chinese  cyber criminal group to target South East Asian organizations from the video gaming sector. Winnti malware used by hackers to hijack control of web users systems using a new backdoor contained in the legitimate Aheadlib analysis tool. Dubbed as " Bkdr_Tengo.A, " passes itself off as a legitimate system DLL file called winmm.dll. " We believe that this was done using a legitimate tool called Aheadlib, which is a legitimate analysis tool. "  wrote Trend Micro's Eduardo Altares. " The file is not encrypted and neither was it particularly hard to analyze. Its main behavior is to steal Microsoft Office, .PDF, and .TIFF files from USB drives inserted into the system. These stolen files are stored in the $NtUninstallKB080515$ under the Windows folder. It also creates a log file named Usblog_DXM.log. The files can be retrieved by

Watering hole Internet Explorer 8 zero-day attack on the US Department of Labor website last week has spread to 9 more global websites over the weekend, including those run by a big European company operating in the aerospace, defense , and security industries as well as non-profit groups and institutes Attacks exploiting a previously unknown and currently unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser have spread to at least. Researchers analyzing the attacks say that the attack tie it to a China-based hacking group known as " DeepPanda ". Security firm CrowdStrike said its researchers unearthed evidence suggesting that the campaign began in mid-March. Their analysis of logs from the malicious infrastructure used in the attacks revealed the IP addresses of visitors to the compromised sites. The logs showed addresses from 37 different countries, with 71 percent of them in the US, 11 percent in South/Southeast Asia, and 10 percent in Europe. Micros

#OpUSA campaign is officially started, the day has come, today May 7 as announced by Anonymous , a coordinated online attack will hit Banking and government websites. The announcement made by popular group of hacktivists is creating great concerns between US security experts in charge of defense the potential targets. The message passed sent by Anonymous to US authorities is eloquent, " We Will Wipe You Off the Cyber Map "  A new wave of attacks, presumably distributed-denial-of-service attack , is expected to hit principal US financial institutions exactly as already happened in the last months. The hacktivists participating to OpUSA campaign protest against the policy of the US Government blamed to have committed war crimes in foreign states and in its countries. "A nonymous will make sure that's this May 7 will be a day to remember. On that day anonymous will start phase one of operation USA. America you have committed multiple war crimes in Iraq, Afg

A dangerous variant of the Ramnit malware has been discovered targeting the UK's financial sector. Trusteer claims to have discovered an interesting trojan based attack technique that injects highly convincing and interactive real-time messages into the user Web stream that they encounter when logging into a UK online banking session. The Ramnit worm was discovered in 2010, but in 2011 researchers spotted a new strain that had incorporated source code from the notorious Zeus banking trojan. Cyber criminals are stepping up their use of social engineering techniques to bypass increasingly security-aware users of online banking and e-commerce sites.   The malware reportedly avoids detection by going into an idle sleep mode until its intended victim logs into their online bank account, at which point it activates and presents them with a fraudulent phishing message. Ramnit circumvented the OTP feature at the target bank using a 'Man in the Browser' attack to in

The Dutch police have confirmed the arrest of a 35-year-old man suspected of taking part in a massive DDoS attack against the anti-spam group Spamhaus back in March . The attack's bandwidth peaked at over 300Gbps, making it the largest DDoS attack in history. Their target, Spamhaus, is a company which creates blacklists of spam sites and sells them to Internet Service Providers. Spamhaus was attacked with DDOS and the website overcrowded with traffic and went offline. Later CloudFlare was hired by Spamhaus to protect against such attacks. The suspect was arrested by Spanish authorities in Barcelona based on a European arrest warrant and is expected to be transferred to the Netherlands soon. The man arrested is believed to be Sven Kamphuis, the owner and manager of Dutch hosting firm Cyberbunker that has been implicated in the attack. This DDoS attack was believed to have been sparked when Spamhaus placed CyberBunker on its spam blacklist. Cyberbunker is a D